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The Military Issues & History Forum is a venue to discuss issues relating to the military aspects of the Indian Armed Forces, whether the past, present or future. We request members to kindly stay within the mandate of this forum and keep their exchanges of views, on a civilised level, however vehemently any disagreement may be felt. All feedback regarding forum usage may be sent to the moderators using the Feedback Form or by clicking the Report Post Icon in any objectionable post for proper action. Please note that the views expressed by the Members and Moderators on these discussion boards are that of the individuals only and do not reflect the official policy or view of the Bharat-Rakshak.com Website. Copyright Violation is strictly prohibited and may result in revocation of your posting rights - please read the FAQ for full details. Users must also abide by the Forum Guidelines at all times.

1. Detailed military info on Indian armed forces.2. Articles on military and strategic areas.

The first has sadly become a bit redundant with Wikipedia and sometimes lags behind current events due to need to constantly maintain this part and due to rapid growth and modernization of the armed forces, as well as various blogs and websites which cover the defence news 24/7/365. This would be difficult to improve or completely change unless plan to become a magazine like Flight global, SP’s etc.

On the second part we can work, such as technical papers on military issues, articles on military issues or anecdotes by ex-military people, techno-strategic issues by scientists, test pilots etc, Geo-strategic issues by ex-MEA people etc.

They need not participate in BRF so as to contribute on BR articles. The dichotomy of BR and BRF has to be understood.

The next thing is that the forum should contribute to the main site, this is a must. The forum was created to contribute to the mainsite but instead has become a whole thing in itself. There is a huge group of people with good knowledge and many experts, however the energy is not being channelled into something productive and instead is lost when the thread are archived and or deleted. The archives do not serve much purpose as they are not used for knowledge dissemination outside or even inside the forum. The question here is how to do that?

My suggestions:1 Make a long post thread where long posts covering a specific point or a particular issue are made. These should be then converted to articles with the help of other posters and moderators. The good post thread stops short of this and doesn’t cover a particular issue.

2 Make threads for “ideas on particular issues for articles” and a request for articles by members, this should give a sense of what the members would like to be covered.

3 A thread for blogposts by members or even allow individual threads for blogposts that the members feel have some material to contribute, thrash these out and make them into articles.

Another aspect that I would like to mention is the discussions are nowadays more focussed on strategic issues than military issues, while it would be a bad thing for a military oriented site, as a website covering such issues it would be a good thing. The BR mainsite has to change here to accommodate miscellaneous articles covering such issues. This would allow channelling the expertise gained in strategic matters.

Our strategic areas coverage while is excellent in area of Bakistan, it completely sucks in the area of South-east Asian affairs. There are several reasons for this such as language barrier etc. One reason that I feel can be easily overcome is lack of awareness about these areas. For these we can have

1 BR mainsite primers for each country, that can cover various aspects of relations as well as details of political parties and personalities as well as historical linkages, people of Indian origin and their relation dynamics etc.

2 BRF resource threads which list say links to mainstream news papers, tools to overcome language barriers, links to blogs, twitter and other social media so as to generate a regular source of information available for analysis.

The forum is becoming very slow. Earlier, once during mid-day when DB backups were being taken, the site would display the error "too many sql connections". Now, it happens at different times throughout the day. And it also takes a long time to load the forum pages. Can the admins please look into this issue?

can we remove the br frame from the news links? i suggest that we put direct external links if there are no copyright issues. the current format screws up things for mobile devices. i also don't understand the need for the frame.

The main page update is welcome (welcome not liked) few suggestions/whines/complaints

- clicking the BR discussion tabs takes one to a hodge podge of threads, I know it is new tekniki bringing up the active threads by most recent post I dunno about others but I see threads under the burka amongst the hodge podge, which makes burka moot, no? my suggestion please make it as earlier clicking the BRF tab brings up the forum index and burka visible onree to those who are logged in.

- the link to blog is most prominent and the tweeter and other SM links are almost invisible. suggestion, it should have other way around SM links at the top most visible along with link to blog, BRR/SRR etc.

- personal whine/complaint: moi still cannot access BRF from me home, have to use TOR or peruse through 3G/4G network. work place connection is fine.

now for some back patting ( the BRF team not mine) the page is loading rapidier, waaaaaay rapidier than the older page and one immediately gets summary of the sister sites, nice, moi like it.

shiv wrote:Indranil one of the curses that moderators suffer from is the inability to put anyone on their ignore list - a luxury that only non mods can have.

Unfortunately with a huge volume of posts and an inability to read the crap that represents 75% of posts results in a situation where two types of posts coexist side by side on a given thread. One type of post demonstrates how the US does it. The other post shows how something is not being done in India by Air Marshals accused of having some sort of bias. When such posts coexist we have a thread in which a random visitor discovers the efficient way in which the US does something, and the accursed way in which IAF air marshals are letting us down. And while no one is actively encouraging anything here the net effect of not noticing the number of "How well the US does it" posts and another sprinkling of "How bad is the IAF" shape the narrative of the discussion in a manner that puts the IAF in a bad light while suggesting that the US way is the right way. Admins cannot escape responsibility here by saying that they can't monitor every post. That is their job.

Apart from cracking down on the negative comments I have suggested that the competence and clout of the US is acknowledged and recognized and I have started a separate thread which I hope will be used to show how the US does it. We need to give space for those who genuinely admire the competence and efficiency of the US so they don't have to "follow their heart" on a thread meant for the Indian armed forces. Once an Indian focused thread fills up with US arms references and the only refs to India are about inefficiency corruption and love of phoren, we are creating an environment for the continuation of that.

Good points. There is one more thing as well. Somebody famous said, "Todays youth are uncomfortable with silence". It seems to apply here if no news from (say) LCA is forth coming, people still feel the need to converse over it. Usually crap follows.

shiv wrote:Unfortunately if 10 admins cannot attend to 100% of posts then we need ten more new admins while we ask those who cannot fulfil their mandate to step aside. But we need dedication to the Indian Armed forces and not simply a love of military and technology. There is at least one admin who qualifies as the latter.

I don't know if you are pointing towards me. I can assure that if we were talking in person, I would have just smiled back. The quietest of the mouth are often not the quietest in their mind.

The art of retaining or disseminating knowledge, patience to learn or respect knowledge is entirely lost. Not just in the forum, but in real life. Now their in only pretense of knowing (sometimes behind this psuedo-anonymity, sometimes not even in purdah) remains. Those that ideologically promote one bias or the other are doing it out of their ego (over satyameyva jayate) or for business reasons. Any reasonable person would sooner or later, given enough rope, agree to disagree.

As shiv points out, in this new environment especially the increased secrecy and removal of even what little transparency there was, only half baked brochure tables are being fought over.

There is no reason (perhaps jest and satire are valid exceptions) to generate a cooked up narrative here. I can suggest a few simple improements:

-- there are not that many active threads, so creating a first post like the bakistan thread in each in a standard format and mandating it for all future iterations could serve as a meaningful archive and warning against distractions. Perhaps some first posts might rise to monitor articles in the future. It could be noted in the template that there are severe deficiencies in the procurement system AND no armed service is perfect BUT those are proscribed aspects, just like religion always has been.

-- arguing psuedo-technically (based on random DDM or wiki, AND without understanding of the fundamentals of the problem) with other anonymous entities who might know better is proscribed.

-- Some guidance in the signup form that other forum members (especially those that have survivedhere) are likely to know what they are talking about, the audience is knowledgeable, and everybody can google.

In my lowly opinion, the main cause of the rut is that the information source -- maz personally photographing, or phillip organizing a kilo visit or forces in general opening up at aero india and the like -- has dried up. The fish are thrashing about in the filth put out by industrial sources that are the bloggers and gernalists (spelling mistake intended).

So things wont get better no matter what, you can only try stemming the tide.

Having lurked here for a long time, one thing that seems pretty common here and any other place is that Indian posters focus too much on theoretical aspects or ideal vision instead of focusing on the ground realities. Just yesterday, I made a long post about the majority/minority issue in burkha thread, and one of counter argument I received were more about technicalities of certain terms than the premise of my arguments.

A lot of fairly good argument points are just blatantly ignored in the favor of arguing what's in scripture or taking offense over minor issues. That offense eventually turns into an ego fight with one faction going one way while the other going opposite to it.

There's also a very very biased and cynical attitude towards anything India and Indian related. Not saying, India is the best in everything it does, but when someone posts something good about certain aspect of India, the few posts that follow go on a complete tangent over how there's nothing to feel good about etc.

There's a difference between criticism done to improve knowledge and discussion quality and just blatant whining.

I think if moderators try to mold the forum towards these aspects, the forum will have a much better flow instead of the circle jerk arguments that keep happening in almost every thread over almost any issue. A little maturity by some posters, including me ofcouse, would go a far way in making things a bit smoother to discuss, read and understand.

Just my two cents.

Added later: Also, although there seems to be a wide consensus on some idiotic journalists and news agencies constantly spouting BS against India, Hindus, the military and our traditions, these journos and their biased articles are repeatedly posted in a wide range of threads which again does nothing more than create noise about nothing. I think having a thread/list to discredit some stupid journalists who have a history of cooking up stories should be made so that people can avoid posting articles written by them.

The BR Mainsite news content is an embarrassment. Looks like a automated data feed with no curation. Sorry to sound harsh, but we can't call ourselves "Bharat Rakshak" & have articles like the above prominently displayed. This is not even the first time. Its been going on forever

Can we turn it off for a week and fix it? If it is difficult to curate, can we at least have a white list of desi news sites from which we pull? Don't see why we should show news links from unheard of sites, let alone hostile ones like the above.

I thought it should be fairly clear by now that members who do not wish to participate can opt out of participating, but they cannot request for deletion of all their previous posts for obvious reasons. (all those missing posts will make the rest of the discussion look stupid and one sided.).

So, There is no point in making a post that says - delete my id and all my posts.. the best that can happen is your id can be 'banned' on request (Assuming the member cannot exercise self control over his own postings) .. but posts will remain.